Oracle platform targets security

Oracle last week set in motion the second phase of its multiyear, three-prong plan to develop an integrated suite of identity management software using the piece parts it acquired over the last two years.

The suite's goal is to offer corporations everything from fine-tuned access control to identity federation with partners as corporations address security and compliance issues by building identity-management infrastructures.

Oracle last week announced the availability of Oracle Identity Manager 10g R3, the provisioning software that is one part of the Oracle Identity Management suite. Compliance features highlight the R3 software, which was acquired last year along with Thor Technologies. Provisioning software provides a platform for giving users access to resources based on a set of roles and rules and an audit trail for who has access to what and when.

Identity Manager R3 is the first in a series of software releases that will continue this summer when the company updates its federation software (acquired from Phaos in 2004 and Oblix in 2005), its access-management software (Oblix) and its virtual directory technology (acquired from OctetString in 2005).

Oracle's short-term goal is to deliver incremental upgrades to the components of its identity-management suite but the ultimate goal is to align all the software under a common architecture.

"I'd characterize Oracle as having established communication among these components, but not yet integration and functional rationalization," says Jonathan Penn, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Oracle says the task of identity integration will take another leap forward with the release of Oracle Identity Management 11 sometime next year.

Oracle faces the same chore as many other vendors, which is tying together a collection of software garnered through acquisition into an identity platform with common underpinnings such as a single workflow engine.

"Oracle plans to be out front, and their plan is clearly to be a leader in this marketplace," says Roberta Witty, an analyst with Gartner. But Witty says Oracle, like many others, such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and Sun, has bought its way into the identity-management battle. "Who is to say if any one of them is more articulate in identity and access management than the other," Witty says.